In the face of heightening US intervention, increasing presence of US and allied foreign troops, intensifying foreign economic plunder and worsening puppetry of the Aquino regime to the US government, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) calls on the Filipino people and all their patriotic, democratic, progressive and revolutionary forces to launch a widespread campaign to banner the call for national liberation. Let us declare 22-30 April as National Sovereignty and Patrimony Week to jumpstart this intensified propaganda and education campaign to drum up the patriotic demands of the Filipino people.

Let us recall the Filipino people’s heroes in ther struggle for national independence, from Andres Bonifacio to Macli-ing Dulag, from Amado V. Hernandez to Crispin “Ka Bel” Beltran, from Ka Bert Olalia to Ka Roger, from Teresa Magbanua to Juvy Capion, and all those who have died upholding national freedom.

The National Sovereignty and Patrimony Week will cover the scheduled swing-by visit of US imperialist chieftain Barack Obama. It will also cover the upcoming anniversary of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). It covers as well the death anniversary of Macli-ing Dulag and the celebrations of the International Earth Day which underscore the issue of increasing foreign plunder of the country’s unrenewable resources and the resulting worsening state of environmental destruction.

The struggle to uphold national sovereignty and patrimony is set to become one of the Filipino people’s central points of resistance in the rest of the year and in succeeding years as they amplify their demand for the ouster of the current puppet Aquino regime.

This struggle currently involves:

opposing the planned presentation or signing of the Agreement for Enhanced Defense Cooperation which will allow the US to carve military enclaves in the Philippines in order to maintain its permament presence and increase the number of its troops to several thousand;

opposing increasing US military interventionism in providing the puppet regime with military funding and arms support, conducting surveillance operations, providing logistical support and direct participation during combat operations, conducting bombing runs;

opposing the planned amendment of the 1987 constitution (“chacha” or charter change) which seeks to remove restrictions against foreign ownership of land and business operations in the Philippines;

opposing the Aquino regime’s priorities that help generate an empty economic bubble of office space, mall and condominium construction but refuse to carry out genuine land reform and national industrialization.

Let us vigorously push for the Filipino people’s fight against the US-Aquino regime’s schemes to further subject the country’s patrimony to foreign plunder by amending the 1987 constitution to allow foreign big capitalists to own land and run their wholly- or majority-owned enterprises to the further detriment of local capital; and to allow the US military to establish exclusive enclaves within camps of the local armed forces, carry out interventionism and make use of the Philippines as a base of its aggression in the Asia-Pacific region.

We must set the spotlight on the prevailing grave socio-economic conditions that is a result of US-imposed neoliberal policies which have brought about unprecendented hardships on the people, including the deregulation of the oil industry, the further liberalization of the power industry, the privatization of water services, the use of public funds to augment crony investments in tollways and other infrastructure projects and so on.

We must develop strong national criticism of the Aquino regime and all previous puppet regimes over the past seven decades for their failure to develop a national industrial base and independent economy capable of producing the needs for domestic consumption and production and sustaining employment. We must expose the import-dependent, export-oriented and debt-financed production that oppresses the workers with low wages and the peasants with widespread landgrabbing.

We must condemn the reactionary puppet state for subjecting the country’s national patrimony to foreign plunder, allowing foreign big capitalists to siphon out unrenewable mineral resources; and grab tens of thousands of hectares of land and carve out large tracts into chemical-fed plantations which cause massive soil erosion and the poisoning of rivers and streams.

Like the foreign-owned semi-manufacturing plants in the so-called “economic zones,” the foreign-owned mines and big logging and plantation operations are interested only in exploiting the cheap labor and cheap raw materials in the Philippines. These do not serve to develop local production and fail to generate a substantial number of jobs correspondent to the extent of its super-profits.

We must sharply criticize the Aquino regime for allowing the American and its partner Chinese big banks and finance oligarchs to generate a bubble of office-space and condominium construction, and the artificial expansion of the local stock market without expansion in the real economy. Aquino has refused to carry out land reform and national industrialization, dismissing these as “ideologically charged concepts”. We must hold Aquino responsible for the Philippine bubble economy that is bound to burst within or right after his term.

We must aim to reinvigorate the Filipino people’s sense of patriotism and national dignity by carrying out, among others, a sustained campaign to review Philippine history from the nationalist point of view.

Since 2001, the puppet reactionaries and the US imperialists have carried out an all-out ideological offensive to portray US basing and interventionism as a necessary element in the so-called “war against terror”. The aim of the US and its local puppets is to counter the Filipino people’s strong sense of nationalism in opposing US military bases which they demonstrated in massive protests in 1991 demanding the abrogation of the 1946 Military Bases Agreement.

From 2002 onwards, the US will station in Zamboanga City a 600 (later 700) -strong contingent of interventionist troops from the US Pacific Command under the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P). The JSOTF-P has since been involved in surveillance, joint trainings, combat operations and bombing runs with the AFP. To cover up and make US basing and interventionism more palatable, this contingent has actively engaged in public relations activities, carrying out token school construction and village electrification projects, making use of loose change from the overflowing funds of the US military.

By the end of the 2000s, the US would become isolated in the conduct of its “war on terror” characterized by widespread abuses of human rights, the continued occupation of and defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the Obama regime, the US imperialists would come up with new excuses such as “freedom of navigation” and “democratic regime change” to justify the expansion of its military presence and interventionism.

Since 2011, the US-directed Aquino regime has played an important role in the “US pivot” towards Asia to provide the justification for the plan to deploy 60% of its overseas naval forces and 50% of its land-based troops in the Asia Pacific. Aquino received briefing by US officials aboard US warship USS Carl Vinson in May 2011 afterwhich made noise of asserting the Philippine claim over the South China Sea land formations and called for US military support. Henceforth, the Aquino regime will allow more and more US warships to dock in Philippine ports and sail by the disputed territories, effectively provoking China to become more assertive in defining and defending its territories and making incursions into the UN-defined exclusive economic territory of the Philippines.

We must expose, debunk and oppose the claim of the Aquino regime that it is defending Philippine national sovereignty in allowing the US military to maintain its presence in Philippine seas and have restricted access to Philippine facilities in order to confront China’s aggressive assertion of its claim over the South China Sea land formations.

Aquino’s assertion is no different from the justification of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo for welcoming US colonial troops to supposedly fight the Spanish colonialists. The result will not be different: through its military, the US will maintain its power and dominance over the Philippines and make use of the country for its strategic economic and military interests.

We must assert and prove that upholding and defending national sovereignty and national patrimony can only be carried out as an independent act of a country. To claim that one’s country can assert its sovereignty with the help of a superpower is to beg to become a protectorate of that power.

We must be able to gather the united voice of the Filipino people to oppose the Agreement for Enhanced Defense Cooperation being forged by the US and the Aquino governments which will allow the US to circumvent prohibitions in the 1987 constitution against foreign military facilities. Let us generate a strong national demand to abrogate the Mutual Defense Treaty (1956), the Visiting Forces Agreement (1998) and the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (2002).

We must relentlessly oppose US interventionism in the internal affairs of the Philippines. We must expose how the US embassy operates as the center of political power of the reactionary state in the Philippines were policies, laws and programs emanate. We must expose how the US military directs the Philippine military in the conduct of the counterrevolutionary war Oplan Bayanihan, which was patterned after the US Counterinsurgency Guide of 2009.

We must shatter the illusion of a “globalized” world being promoted by the imperialists’ ideological and cultural agencies which seek to erase the national boundaries of the third world countries and subject these to military intervention and economic plunder. We must assert the necessity of achieving national sovereignty and defending the country’s patrimony as the key factors for securing the country’s future as a modern and progressive state amid the global crisis of capitalism.